Literary festivals are a little like football clubs: just about every single town has one, and when it comes to attracting performers, geographical location provides a decisive and unfair advantage. Football clubs can compensate by chucking money at the problem, which is why Brazilians end up playing in some of our less attractive industrial cities, when they could have gone to Spain or Portugal, but there is no money in literary festivals so it really is all about where you’re at. Parati, in Brazil, doesn’t seem to have had too much trouble reeling in authors; ditto Mantova and Reykjavik.  When I was invited to speak at a festival in Gavoi, a small town in the middle of Sardinia, earlier this month, I found that, for reasons I probably don’t have to explain, I wasn’t as busy as I’d thought. 

I probably don’t need to explain how much fun it was, either. It was hot, and the food was good, and the people were nice, and the hotel had a great pool, and I’ll shut up now, before you start thinking that a writer’s life isn’t, after all, filled with despair and difficulty. Weirdly, one of the most memorable parts of the weekend was having my picture taken, usually a terrible waste of time even if you’re George Clooney. Every year in Gavoi a local photographer takes a portrait picture of all the writers appearing at the festival; the following year, the portraits are displayed on walls around the town, and if you happen to own one of these walls, then you are the curator of the portrait – you put it up and take it down each day, keep it clean, maybe even feed it and water it. It’s one of the many ways in which the people of Gavoi are invited to feel a part of the activities.   The photos are all taken indoors, and so the photographer looks at you and then decides where she would like to shoot you; in my case, she decided that she would use the cool, clean and admirably uncluttered house of an elderly lady in the centre of the town. (Don’t ask me why, but it’s almost certainly something to do with me being bald. It usually is, when it comes to photographs.) When we got there, the elderly lady had gathered various friends and family members for the occasion, and my wife and I were served delicious meringues, a local delicacy, and I talked to a rabid Juve fan about Patrick Vieira; it certainly beat being made to feel like a twerp for thirty minutes in a hotel lobby, which is what normally happens with photoshoots.  It’s not right, though, only going to festivals in nice places. I feel I should do some kind of penance. If you live somewhere irredeemably unattractive, and you’re trying to put on a festival, please invite me, and I’ll come. I wonder if anyone will own up to how they feel about where they live….

One of the joys of my job is the unpredictability of some of the requests received. To my great delight, I have been invited to draw a picture of my own a***ehole, as an appropriate way to mark the passing – as it were – of the great Kurt Vonnegut, who drew his own in ‘Breakfast of Champions’. Eric Spitznagel, who extended the invitation, runs a website called ‘Vonnegut’s A**ehole’ (and it’s an American website, so only two asterisks are necessary), and he claims that there is serious publishing interest in a collection of similar self-portraits. On the one hand, I can’t draw to save my life; on the other, the subject – unless I possess a particularly complicated and/or beautiful one – would require really very little talent. And how long could it take, really?

My current projects….Actually, there are no current projects. I have just finished dealing with the copy editor’s last few queries relating to SLAM, a novel that is about and hopefully for teenagers; the nth draft of the screenplay I’ve been working on for the last couple of years, an adaptation of Lynn Barber’s autobiographical essay AN EDUCATION, is out in the world looking for a director. Martin Amis once said that you should never talk about a film you’re connected to until you can rent it from your local Blockbuster. I don’t mind talking about it, but you must understand that anything I say is likely to look like preposterous bullshit in a couple of months, maybe even in a couple of hours. A few weeks ago, AN EDUCATION had a director, but no cast and no money; now it has a pretty good cast, it’s just about financed, and our director has gone. This is what happens in independent cinema, and it makes you yearn for the comfortable and gentlepersonly reassurances of publishing. If I write a book that I’m happy with and my editor is happy with, then it will get published. If I write a screenplay that I’m happy with and the producers are happy with, there’s probably a ten per cent chance that the film will get made. So now I’m making up my mind what I want to do next. Penguin is planning a series of illustrated novellas, and I’m pretty sure I’d like to have a go at one of those – there’s something I’ve been thinking about that my work in this form. And I have an idea for an original screenplay. If I start on both now, then one might see the light of day next spring, and the other in four years’ time, if it even lives that long. Meanwhile, it’s hot, and there are books to be read, films to be seen, bets to be made….

Update: Penguin’s plans for an illustrated series have collapsed. And the film business is insane. And I’ve temporarily given up betting, because I know nothing about summer sports. There are still books to be read, though.